Mobile web Dead ? When exactly it started properly ?

There is an excellent conversation going on at Read/Write Web where Marshall Kirkpatrick discusses that is the mobile web dead or not ? He got this conversation started because Russell Beatie (founder of mowser)is convinced that mobile web is not growing the way it was speculated and rather it’s declining at a fast pace.
The conversation really took a better shape with Jason Grigsby’s comment where he said that the mobile web which Russell was pointing was more towards the mobile web applications based on Pre-iPhone phones and not the ones which are coming up with bigger/wider screens and have got all the way better web browsers. Well said Jason!

First, when Russell says Mobile Web, he is narrowly defining it as “developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time.” Basically, he is describing building sites for pre-iPhone mobile devices.

Well, personally I don’t use mobile phones for accessing the web and the reason is simple, I don’t have a mobile phone which can access the web as I still prefer a phone which can do the talking and nothing fancy. However, I can certainly say that mobile web is far from being dead, rather it’s still in a stage where we are waiting for more and more people to adopt the phones which are capable of doing more things using cell-phones.

To be honest I feel that it’s really Nokia’s N- 95 and Apple’s iPhone which really qualify or are in a position, from where mobile web will start. Companies like Google, Yahoo & Microsoft are actively spending their time and effort in making the mobile experience better and companies like Nokia, Apple and Motorola are doing well to come up with smart phones which will make mobile web a regular habit in future.

That’s just the starting point, there is a lot which can be said when we start the conversation over this and the other thing which I’d like to point out is that the companies like Opera and Mozilla are putting their time and effort in building browsers which can run mobile web applications.

What do you think, is mobile web already dead ? I think that it still hasn’t started yet (or has just started) and has long way to go.